VISUALIZATION, ETC.

I do not review manuscripts submitted to closed access journals

There are many unfortunate ways in which our scientific publishing
system is broken. Much of it is path dependence, unfortunate but
mostly unavoidable to get to where we are today. In this category:
research output in paper-sized chunks; professional merit given
disproportionally to material readable by
humans as opposed to material readable
by humans and computers. Some of the
unfortunate things, on the other hand, are just greed and
rent-seeking. For a long time, now, closed-access journals have jumped
from the former to the latter categories. We should try to fix all of
the problems with this system, but greed and rent-seeking deserve, in
my view, more direct actions.

For this reason, I have pledged to not submit, referee or serve in
editorial boards for Elsevier (and generally refuse to do so in other
for-profit, closed-access venues). On a regular basis, I get requests
to review or submit work to these journals, and I automatically
decline. But there’s declining and there’s declining.

How to decline kindly

I can’t in good conscience help perpetuate a system that ultimately
deprives the public of the science they pay for. At the same time, I
understand that there are people on the other side of the email that
says “please review this” email. And these people, in all likelihood,
have not designed the system. They possibly even dislike it and agree
with me, which means that they could even be allies! So every
time I get an email like that, I fret about how to respond: I want to
help fix this mess. Annoying the people that are helping perpetuate
the system is a price I’m willing to way, but annoying people who
could be helping us seems foolish.

So today I decided to write this public response, saving me many
future keystrokes and minutes, and hopefully increasing the chance of
convincing the next person over that they, too, should help putting
knowledge back into the human commons.

The Letter

Dear editorial board/program committee,

Thank you for your offer to review/submit a manuscript to your venue.
I appreciate your willingness of having my name represent the venue in
some form. Unfortunately, your publisher currently stands against free
and open access to the hard work put in by authors and reviewers. I
cannot in good conscience help perpetuate the perversity of the
current system, and so will decline your request.

I will be happy to participate in the future, should your publisher
choose to change their policies. I understand that in some cases
circumstances deprive you of the power to enact these changes
yourself. At the same time, if people like myself, who have the choice
to act differently, do not try to change the situation, then certainly
publishers will be happy to maintain the status quo.

I encourage you to forward this letter to your supervisors and
executive boards.

For the same reasons described above, I cannot in good conscience
recommend anyone else to perform these duties under unacceptable
terms.

Yours,
Carlos Scheidegger

Further reading: The Cost of Knowledge

If you’re just joining us and don’t know what’s been going on, let me
take this opportunity and point you to the Cost of
Knowledge, a place where you
can publicly pledge to stop helping Elsevier destroy the commons we
all work hard to create. If you don’t know about the war Elsevier has
been waging against libraries, that’s probably because librarians are
contractually forbidden from discussing the pricing strategies
employed by Elsevier. Yes, really. You can read the full statement
here.